This invention relates to an apparatus for nesting curvilinear articles, and more particularly sinuous spring elements such as found in upholstery.
During the course of upholstering, it is desirable to use spring elements having a sinuous shape. Attention is drawn to U.S. Pat. No. 2,800,928 for a description of the manufacturing process of said spring elements. It is to be noted that these spring elements are of a curvilinear shape, this shape being the basis for their elastic nature. A recurrent problem with the use of said elements is the difficulty incurred in storing said elements because of their unusual shape. In response to this problem, it has been shown that a nested bundle is the optimum storage configuration for these elements.
In manufacturing precut spring elements, however, the elements have been produced by an apparatus which separately ejects each cut spring element. These ejected spring elements are then manually nested. It has been found to be extremely difficult to manually nest these precut spring elements once they have attained their curvilinear form. Additionally, the apparatus which has made these curvilinear sinuous spring elements, forms, and ejects these elements at speeds substantially greater than can be nested by hand. Consequently, to balance spring production with spring nesting, these apparatus' have been caused to run at speeds well below their operational capability.
Along with the need to speed up the nesting process, it was desired that the curvilinear sinuous spring elements found within the nested configuration be aligned in a particular manner. It became apparent that by being able to control the rotational alignment of these spring elements with respect to one another more spring elements could be placed in a given nest size. Manual nesting of precut sinuous spring elements provided no accurate method for accomplishing these desirable results at a reasonable production rate.